The Curious Case of the Trademarked Doctor

By Robert Ryan 

Me and my big mouth. I have to confess that as I sat down to write Dead Man’s Land I had a moment of self-doubt about what I had engineered. I was about to start writing a novel using someone else’s creation. I had never done that before. The central character in Dead Man’s Land is Dr John H Watson, as penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. True, plenty of people had written ‘continuation’ Holmes and Watson stories (heavy hitters such as Horowitz, Dibdin, King, and Chabon among them), but few had tackled a solo Watson. I found the idea daunting. And it was all my own fault.

If we rewind a few months, I was in discussion with Maxine Hitchcock, editorial director of Simon & Schuster, when she said the company were looking for a work of fiction featuring a 'detective in the trenches of WWI'. I said it was interesting idea, but I had a story that took place just before war broke out, which could be continued into the trenches. I gave her an outline and sample of a novel based around a (genuine) Royal scandal and a disgraced detective. We both felt, though, it didn’t quite hit the mark (although, waste not want not, it now forms part of the backstory of Dead Man's Land). So we went back and looked at the original concept. I gave my objections – that any civilian investigator would be difficult to place in the trenches and that most military policemen were charged with tackling desertion and ‘cowardice’ rather than solving crimes. That’s when I opened my big mouth: 'Actually, it would be better if he wasn't a policeman, but a doctor, just behind the lines, a man who might recognize a murder when he sees one. And why not go one step further and make it Dr Watson, who, we are told at the end of His Last Bow, is to rejoin his 'old service'. That would be the Royal Army Medical Corps at that stage.'

Ms Hitchcock didn’t actually say ‘Bingo!’ but it was words to that effect.

In truth, I had been incubating this idea for some years, ever since I stumbled across the fact that Watson had served in WW1 in Jack Tracy’s Sherlockiana encyclopedia. I had hesitated because of my reluctance to take on another man’s character. But, with fresh versions of Holmes on film and TV in the offing, it seemed a judicious time to bring Dr Watson from out of the great detective’s very long shadow.

However, as my agent explained patiently, although the Conan Doyle canon is out of copyright, Dr. Watson has been trademarked (the way Disney trademark Mickey Mouse etc.) by the Conan Doyle Estate, along with Holmes, Moriarty and Professor Challenger. Would this really stand up to legal scrutiny? I wasn’t sure. But the whole Holmes copyright issue is murky – not here but in the USA, where the situation is blurred because of various Holmes movies. The legal representatives of the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle insist that as The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes is still in copyright, which means Holmes himself (and Watson) is protected until 2023. The New York Times described the situation as ‘a tangled web’. I had no desire to get caught up in it.

  

So, it seemed worth getting the estate's blessing to proceed and, after a nervy pitch on the phone and a couple of emails outlining plot and characters, permission was granted to say that Dead Man's Land was officially sanctioned worldwide (including the USA) by Andrea Plunket, Administrator of Conan Doyle Copyrights. It might have been unnecessary, legally and strictly speaking, but it made me sleep easier and also distanced Dead Man’s Land somewhat from the mass of Holmes–related fanfiction on the Internet.

And my misgivings about sitting down to tackle another author’s creation? Well, the breakthrough came when I realized I had dealt with real people before in my fiction – Lawrence of Arabia, Captain Scott, Winston Churchill, Admiral Canaris, Ronnie Biggs and Bruce Reynolds – and I was well aware that many people (especially those who still write letters to 221b Baker St) consider Holmes and Watson to be actual historical characters. That was the approach I would take. Somehow, treating the Holmes stories as if they were genuine reportage by Dr Watson made it more straightforward.  Plus, once I had decided to tell the story in the third person (as was His Last Bow, the story that kick-started this) and not to try and mimic Conan Doyle, the task of getting plot on paper became much more straightforward. That just left the little matter of getting World War One right….